Science fiction has long shaped and defined science fact. Popular films like Star Trek and Star Wars envisioned technologies of the future and set goals towards which engineers created products. In the 1940’s Issac Asimov formulated the “Three Laws” of robotics in I, Robot, which still inform the field today.

HAL 9000 from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

But the imaginations of these sic-fi writers haven’t only influenced scientists – as vibrant parts of popular culture they’ve also influenced the public. Take HAL 9000 for example, the sentient (and coldly calculating) computer from Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey and later Kubrick’s films. Within the ship, HAL’s essential omnipresence but lack of set physicality gave him an ethereal aura. His pure utilitarianism glistened with a hint of malice and lead many readers/viewers to interpret his actions as ill-intended. HAL became the poster AI for the dangers of super intelligence.

Over the past few years, robots have been introduced into hotels, retail stores, and even nursing homes. They typically do not resemble humans – or, at least, look distinctively robotic – and serve practical functions like tidying up and meal delivery. They take the Star Wars perspective that robots like C-3PO are tools and can’t (or shouldn’t) engage socially like humans.

Meet Alice – a child-sized social care-bot who stars in a new documentary Ik ben Alice, in which she’s introduced as an experiment into the separate homes of three elderly women. Alice was developed by SELEMCA, a research group at VU University Amsterdam, to meet the increasing future demand for aged, lonely, and demented citizens. The experiment enabled researchers to get feedback from elderly participants and alter Alice accordingly.

Rather than give practical aid such as fetching the mail, Alice is designed to provide social aid through programmed questions and conversation. And unlike many of the other care-bots in the industry, Alice is small with a young girl’s face and a plastic robot body. According to Alice’s engineers her small size was meant to be non-intimidating, the anthropomorphic face was meant to be welcoming, and the robotic body is meant to convey clearly that Alice isa robot.

Alice enjoys a soccer game

Though Alice’s wasn’t immediately welcome by the participants – they would occasionally mock or not make eye contact with her – each of them did eventually open up and reveal some personal details about their life, their loneliness, and even their slight but significant excitements. They’d interact with Alice as they would with a human.

The elderly and AI might seem like an unlikely match at first thought. Less versed than younger generations in the nuances of high technology, one might imagine aged individuals would shun Alice, refuse to engage with an artificial intelligence, demand a real human care taker. But surprisingly, most of the elderly woman in the film seem relatively free from this pretense. Yes the women will drop the occasional line about Alice’s unblinking gaze and they’re quick to make a reference to “the robot” when other humans are around. But after some time, while Alice and the ladies sit alone, they begin to have conversations that are just as interactive ours – though they do tend to be oddly paced.

One of the elderly women shows Alice her family photo album

One latent issue in the experiment is the value of authentic social care versus programmed social care – i.e. intuitive, dynamic support versus programmed, systematic support. While a social worker can converse and has the capacity for concern, Alice’s involvement is algorithmic. Her questions and answers are programmed. She only elicits the illusion of emotional engagement. Though Alice might perform the functions of social engagement and concern, it’s impossible to say that Alice actually cares.

On the other hand it’s not hard to believe that many social workers have themselves refined their jobs in to calculated routines of call and response, seemingly engaged but disengaged from the lives of the people whom they care for. Just because humans have the capacity to concern, does not mean they do concern. Like Alice, many just seems to care – which, for the lonely, might be good enough.

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Joanne O’Riordan, 18, is one of only nine people in the United States living with total amelia—a medical condition that prevents arms and legs from developing. She spoke at a United Nations-sponsored conference in April 2012 about her desire to live an independent life, and challenged tech engineers to design a robot assistant to pick up small items and help her with simple everyday tasks. Researchers at Trinity College Dublin took up the challenge and the result is Robbie the Robot, a personal care bot that was developed with a budget of just $69,100. Robbie has a body made from plastic, carbon fiber and aluminum with built-in sensors and actuators.

In his 1942 short story Runaround, science fiction writer Issac Asimov introduced "the three laws of robotics." The laws were designed to provide a set of simple morals to guide advanced artificial intelligence. In reality, it has been argued that we are not even close to creating robots that could even comprehend such rules, but this may be about to change.

These days not all robots are designed to be hardcore metal machines, the arena of soft robotics is beginning to grow. They have a number of obvious benefits including the fact that they are flexible enough to be able to morph and change their physical properties. Other advantages are their ability to be controlled by relatively low-tech means, they can be used in delicate environments, and they are easy to transport.

If you're are looking for a robot companion to be by your side while you work out, fetch you a cold beer or help you test research applications, check out Unbounded Robotics' UBR-1. For around $50,000—which is just a fraction of its competitors—you could have a new robot buddy.

It’s #WatchOutForTheRobots Wednesday!“Watch out for the robots” is just a phrase we use whenever we see a crazy technology that clearly has the potential to be pretty darn scary if it ever were to go awry. No, no, this isn’t because we have a pessimistic view of the future (though phronesis in all technological developments / applications is important), we just love finding/sharing this stuff.

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